


Far

by Madame de flammes (owlaholic68)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Memory Alteration, Not Canon Compliant, POV Multiple, POV Third Person, TAZ Seven Birds AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-12-26 11:03:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18281486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlaholic68/pseuds/Madame%20de%20flammes
Summary: Vex with Vax was happy and confident.Vex without Vax was desperate and in agony.This Vex now is carefree and light-hearted again, because Keyleth has made her forget that her brother ever existed. She made everybody forget.





	Far

**Author's Note:**

> This is mostly inspired by TAZ Balance, but can be read on its own! Takes place somewhere in the canon timeline between them defeating the Chroma Conclave and before Vecna.

“Hey, do you guys think these are worth anything?”

Keyleth turns at Vex’s question and her heart twists. Vex, recently come back from a scouting mission with Grog, has a pair of boots dangling from her fingertips. They are made of dark grey leather in a scalloped pattern with dull silver inlays bearing the design of wings.

“Perhaps. They _do_ look arcane in nature,” Percy muses, taking one from Vex to inspect the bottoms. “We can have someone take a look at them when we get a chance.”

“W-Where did you find those?” Keyleth asks. She grips her staff more tightly to try and appease the shaking of her hands. _Please don’t say on a dead body,_ she silently prays. Vax loved those boots, he would have never abandoned them for no reason.

“Secret tunnel. Real high up. One boot on the ground below and the other one up in the tunnel.” Grog reaches into his bag and pulls out two more small objects. Daggers. “These too. Bloody.” He frowns and tries to wipe one on his pants.

“One of the boots is too.” Vex holds it out to Keyleth. “Dear, would you mind? The left one has a rip in it, but I think it’s fixable.”

The distraction is enough to pause Keyleth’s momentary panic. She takes the boot and turns it over to see a gnarly tear in it, the edges stained with dried blood. In her mind, she takes a moment and tries to imagine:

Vax, alone. Vax, lost. Vax, afraid, fighting something in that dungeon without the support of his friends. That _something_ grabs him by the boot and sinks its teeth or claws or pincers in. Vax panics, stabs. It doesn’t stop the thing, so he kicks off his boot and leaves it behind, scrambling up the wall into a secret passage. From up there, he tries to throw another dagger to get the thing to let go of the shoe so he can retrieve it, but to no avail. Faced with the choice of his life or his footwear, Vax abandons his other now-useless shoe and escapes. Hopefully. Vex and Grog hadn’t mentioned a corpse or a set of feathered armor, so maybe there’s still hope. But why wouldn’t Vax have blinked-back his daggers? If he was so relatively close to Whitestone, why hadn’t he come back-

“Keyleth? Are you going to fix it?” Pike pipes up, worried, a hand on Keyleth’s shoulder.

“Ah, yes.” She quickly casts _Mending_ on the tear. “I think I’ve seen something like this before. These are Boots of Haste. V-Vex, you should wear them.” _He would want you to wear them,_ she thinks, keeping her head down. Regretting her decisions, and not for the first time.

“Thank you!” Vex takes the shoe back and holds it up to her feet. “They look like my size, too!” She sits on a bench and dons them. They look perfect on her, like they should. Perfect but also so, so wrong. There should be someone else wearing them instead. There should be someone at Vex’s side, arguing with her about the boots and insisting that they’re _his_ boots, bickering in the friendly way that only siblings could.

But there’s not. There hasn’t been for some time now.

* * *

There are gaps. Keyleth wasn’t perfect.

Everybody remembers the Slayer’s Take, but nobody can pinpoint who killed Hotis the first time. Pike pauses in a retelling of the second time they killed the Rakshasa assassin to briefly wonder about why he was even there.

They get a discount at Gilmore’s and even _he_ doesn’t know why.

Their panic word is “Jenga” and one day Grog muses about why the word is so important to them when none of them have ever had to use it before.

“You asked me to build this,” Zahra replies when Percy asks why she’s tending to a small shrine to the Raven Queen in Whitestone.

“Oh,” he replies, eyes clouding over with static a moment before clearing. “Ah, yes, of course.” He has no idea why it’s important, but sometimes Keyleth passes by to see him there, kneeling and staring up at the statue.

Keyleth never goes in. It feels too much like a betrayal. The beady eyes of the raven carvings in the altar stare at her accusingly. Because it hurts and because Keyleth is a coward, she never enters.

* * *

Scanlan left a month after Vax did. Besides Vex, he was the most desperate, the one holding out the most hope.

Keyleth doesn’t know where he is, if he still remembers. She lives in constant fear of hearing the strains of his music on the wind. But she listens for it anyways, hopes that he’s okay, pays attention to rumors of a fabulous bard. But she doesn’t hear anything.

* * *

There are three versions of Vex that Keyleth has known:

The best one was when everything was okay. When Vex never said _I_ and always said _We_ and always had her brother to back her up.

The worst one was when everything fell apart. When Percy had to hold her back, kicking and screaming and begging to be let out to try and track Vax down. The Vex that would hardly utter a word. Silent at breakfast, silent at lunchtime, silent at dinner. Absent any other time, holed up either in her room or her missing brother’s. Four months after Vax’s disappearance, Percy would drag her down to his workshop for the day so he could have some peace of mind, knowing that she wasn’t lost too.

The third one was the one they had now. Vex without Vax, before, was in agony. She was hurting and one day Keyleth realized that that hurt was never going to heal. This Vex hurts no more.

This Vex did not miss her brother because she did not remember that he had ever existed. Perhaps it was crueler, but Keyleth was desperate and scared, and she didn’t know what else to do. This Vex’s smiles were light and airy. Her steps were carefree and her shoulders unburdened.

This Vex had no one to stop her when she got too greedy. This Vex had no one to recklessly scout ahead for her, so she did the job herself. This Vex was terrified of being left alone. This Vex grew up as an only child and suffered for it.

But this Vex smiles. She laughs. She comes out of her room and she goes hunting with Trinket. She jokes with Grog, hangs out with Pike, loves Percy. This Vex is friends with Keyleth because she has no idea what Keyleth has done.

* * *

How hard was it to find a damn dagger?

The vestiges were terribly dangerous, but they were also tricky to track down. Some were easier than others, flashier or more well-known.

Percy is wearing Cabal’s Ruin. Vex is wielding Fenthras. Pike has recovered the Plate of the Dawnmartyr. Grog’s attacks are devastating now thanks to his Titanstone Knuckles. Keyleth herself has the Spire of Conflux.

Scanlan, wherever he is, still has Mythcarver.

Vax had brought Whisper and his Deathstalker’s Ward with him.

Following a rumor of an assassination where the victim took a great deal of psychic damage, they are tracking Whisper. Keyleth is doing this because she hopes against all odds that Vax will be at the end of their search. The rest are tagging along because they have been spun a story about the enthralling danger of these relics, and the necessity to recover them.

Lies, more lies. Keyleth has had to become an excellent liar over the last year. Gods, she hates it.


End file.
